Robert F. Kennedy once said that a country's gross domestic product (GDP) measures “everything except that which makes life worthwhile”. The metric was developed in the 1930s and 1940s amid the upheaval of the Great Depression and global war. Even before the United Nations began requiring countries to collect data to report national GDP, Simon Kuznets, the metric's chief architect, had warned against equating its growth with well-being.

GDP measures mainly market transactions. It ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality. If a business used GDP-style accounting, it would aim to maximize gross revenue — even at the expense of profitability, efficiency, sustainability or flexibility. That is hardly smart or sustainable (think Enron). Yet since the end of the Second World War, promoting GDP growth has remained the primary national policy goal in almost every country1.

Meanwhile, researchers have become much better at measuring what actually does make life worthwhile. The environmental and social effects of GDP growth can be estimated, as can the effects of income inequality2. The psychology of human well-being can now be surveyed comprehensively and quantitatively3, 4. A plethora of experiments has produced alternative measures of progress (see Supplementary Information).

The chance to dethrone GDP is now in sight. By 2015, the UN is scheduled to announce the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of international objectives to improve global well-being. Developing integrated measures of progress attached to these goals offers the global community the opportunity to define what sustainable well-being means, how to measure it and how to achieve it. Missing this opportunity would condone growing inequality and the continued destruction of the natural capital on which all life on the planet depends.

Dethroning GDP

When GDP was instituted seven decades ago, it was a relevant signpost of progress: increased economic activity was credited with providing employment, income and amenities to reduce social conflict and prevent another world war.

But the world today is very different from the one faced by the global leaders who met to plan the post-war economy in 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The emphasis on GDP in developed countries now fuels social and environmental instability. It also blinds developing countries to possibilities for more-sustainable models of development.

Soaring economic activity has depleted natural resources. Much of the generated wealth has been unequally distributed, leading to a host of social problems5. The philosopher John Stuart Mill noted more than 200 years ago that, once decent living standards were assured, human efforts should be directed to the pursuit of social and moral progress and the increase of leisure, not the competitive struggle for material wealth. Or as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once observed: “To furnish a barren room is one thing. To continue to crowd in furniture until the foundation buckles is quite another.”

The limits of GDP are now clear. Increased crime rates do not raise living standards, but they can lift GDP by raising expenditures on security systems. Despite the destruction wrought by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, both events boosted US GDP because they stimulated rebuilding.

Weighing the alternatives

Alternative measures of progress can be divided into three broad groups (see Supplementary Information). Those in the first group adjust economic measures to reflect social and environmental factors. The second group consists of subjective measures of well-being drawn from surveys. The third group relies on weighted composite indicators of well-being including housing, life expectancy, leisure time and democratic engagement.

Adjusted economic measures. These are expressed in monetary units, making them more readily comparable to GDP. Such indices consider annual income, net savings and wealth. Environmental costs and benefits (such as destroying wetlands or replenishing water resources) can also be factored in. One example is the genuine progress indicator (GPI). This metric is calculated by starting with personal consumption expenditures, a measure of all spending by individuals and a major component of GDP, and making more than 20 additions and subtractions to account for factors such as the value of volunteer work and the costs of divorce, crime and pollution6.

Crucially, unlike other measures in the first group, GPI considers income distribution. A dollar's worth of increased income to a poor person boosts welfare more than a dollar's worth of increased income does for a rich person. And a big gap between the richest and the poorest in a country — as in the United States and, increasingly, in China and India — correlates with social problems, including higher rates of drug abuse, incarceration and mistrust, and poorer physical and mental health5.

These adjustments matter. A 2013 study2 comparing the GDP per capita and the GPI per capita of 17 countries comprising just over half the global population found startling divergences between the two metrics. The measures were highly correlated from 1950 until about 1978, when they moved apart as environmental and social costs began to outweigh the benefits of increased GDP (see 'Genuine progress flattens'). Tellingly, life satisfaction is highly correlated with GPI per capita, but not with GDP per capita.

Some governments are taking this seriously. Two US states, Vermont and Maryland, have in the past three years adopted GPI as a measure of progress and have implemented policies specifically aimed at improving it.

Subjective measures of well-being. The most comprehensive of these is the World Values Survey (WVS), which covers about 70 countries and includes questions about how satisfied people are with their lives. Starting in 1981, the WVS is conducted in 'waves', the sixth of which is currently in progress. Another example is the gross national happiness index used in Bhutan. This measure uses elaborate surveys that ask how content people feel in nine domains: psychological well-being, standard of living, governance, health, education, community vitality, cultural diversity, time use and ecological diversity.

Subjective well-being has been highly studied, and has even been recommended as the most appropriate measure of societal progress7. But subjective indicators are tricky to compare across societies and cultures. For example, self-reported health tracks with clinically reported rates of morbidity and mortality within countries but not across them8. And people are not always aware of the things that contribute to their well-being. Few of us give credit to ecosystem services for water supply and storm protection, for example.

Bhutan has measured citizens' well-being using gross national happiness since 2008.

Weighted composite measures of several indicators. A comprehensive picture of sustainable societal well-being should integrate subjective and objective indicators9(see Supplementary Information, Figure S1), as these measures begin to do. One example is the Happy Planet Index, introduced by the New Economics Foundation in 2006. This multiplies life satisfaction by life expectancy and divides the product by a measure of ecological impact.

Other indices in the third group combine a range of variables, such as income, housing, jobs, health, civic engagement, safety and life satisfaction. The Better Life Index, developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, maintains a website that allows users to choose how to weight variables, revealing how the emphasis on different variables can influence countries' rankings.

Many other experiments are under way (see www.wikiprogress.org). None of these measures is perfect, but collectively they offer the building blocks for something much better than GDP.

Why are we stuck?

There is broad agreement that global society should strive for a high quality of life that is equitably shared and sustainable. Several groups and reports have concluded that GDP is dangerously inadequate as a measure of quality of life — including those published by the French government's 2008 Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress10, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future11 and the European Commission's ongoing Beyond GDP initiative. That conclusion was also echoed in 'The Future We Want', the declaration of the 2012 Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development agreed to by all UN member states.

Nonetheless, GDP remains entrenched1. Vested interests are partly responsible. Former US President Bill Clinton's small move towards a 'green GDP', which factored in some of the environmental consequences of growth, was killed by the coal industry. However, much of the problem is that no alternative measure stands out as a clear successor.

Creating that successor will require a sustained, transdisciplinary effort to integrate metrics and build consensus. One potential vehicle for doing this is the setting up of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a process that is now under way to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Established in 2000, the MDGs comprise eight basic targets that include eradicating extreme poverty and establishing universal primary education, gender equality and environmental sustainability. Currently both the MDGs and the suggested SDGs are only lists of goals with isolated indicators. But the SDG process can and should be expanded to include comprehensive and integrated measures of sustainable well-being12.

“GDP is dangerously inadequate as a measure of quality of life.”

If undertaken with sufficiently broad participation, the hunt for the successor to GDP might be completed by 2015. There are significant barriers to doing this, including bureaucratic inertia and the tendency of governments, academia and other groups to work in isolation. These barriers can be overcome with dedicated leadership. Crucially, people can now communicate across the globe with an ease unthinkable in the days of Bretton Woods.

Any 'top-down' process must be supplemented with a 'bottom-up' engagement of civil society that includes city and regional governments, non-governmental organizations, business and other parties. We recently formed the Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity (www.asap4all.com) to do just that. This web-based 'network of networks' can communicate research about sustainable quality of life and the elements that contribute to it (see Supplementary Information), and so help to build consensus among the thousands of groups now concerned with these issues.

The successor to GDP should be a new set of metrics that integrates current knowledge of how ecology, economics, psychology and sociology collectively contribute to establishing and measuring sustainable well-being. The new metrics must garner broad support from stakeholders in the coming conclaves.

It is often said that what you measure is what you get. Building the future we desire requires that we measure what we want, remembering that it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Stiglitz, J. E., Sen, A. & Fitoussi, J.-P. Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress Vol. 12 (Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, 2009).

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Wednesday, January 15, 2014

‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ – Oscar Wilde

More than a 100 years later we’ve put pricetags on things that Oscar even in his wildest dreams (or nightmares!) could not have seen coming. For example, today for 10 dollars your company can purchase the right to emit a metric ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. For $75 hundred dollars you can hire a human being to be a guinea pig in risky drug trials. And for a quarter of a million dollars you can buy the right to shoot an endangered rhino in South Africa. We’ve somehow managed to put a price tag on life, death and almost everything in between. So in a world where everything has a price --- what happens to the priceless?

That’s the Golden Gate bridge. One of the most beautiful and most photographed bridges in the world. It is a testament to humankind’s technical ingenuity, and also to our moral failure. The Golden Gate Bridge is the second most common suicide site in the world. This is John Kevin Hines. At nineteen, suffering from intense depression he showed up here. He walked the bridge past crowds of tourists with tears streaming down his face. Longing for a moment of human connection. That’s when a woman in sunglasses approached him and asked -- if he would take her picture. She didn’t notice his tears or even stop to ask if he was all right. John took the picture. Gave the woman her camera, and then took three running steps and jumped. He’s one of the rare people who’ve jumped the bridge and miraculously survived. One of the most haunting things he’s shared since his rescue? That if someone, if anyone had given him a smile that day, he would not have jumped.

We live in a time where we have mastered the art of “liking” each other on Facebook but have forgotten the art of loving each other in real life. Disconnection is a growing epidemic. And it’s not a problem isolated to teenagers. It’s a growing problem the workplace. According to a recent study 70% of people are emotionally disconnected at work. And yes we even have a price-tag for that disconnection. It’s calculated to be 300 billion dollars in lost productivity annually. So this is not just a social or spiritual problem. It’s also a business problem, an economic problem.

What’s the solution? Making meaningful products is worthwhile and necessary. But it’s not enough. In fact another study recently showed that the majority of people worldwide wouldn’t care if most of our brands disappeared tomorrow. Our purpose doesn’t lie in our commodities it lies in our sense of communion. It lies not in products, but in the realm of the priceless. You can’t put a price on the smile John didn’t receive that day, just as you can’t put a price on any of our deepest gifts. Compassion. Empathy. Generosity. Trust. So what happens when we as leaders and thinkers bring these priceless gifts back into circulation?

That’s the beginning of Giftivism: the practice of radically generous acts that transform the world.History has seen giftivists in all corners – Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and so forth. People who believed that when we change ourselves, we can fundamentally change the world. But this ability isn’t restricted to social change giants. The seeds of giftivism lie in each of us. But to tap into it we have to do something all these people did. We have to upturn one of the core assumptions of economics – the assumption that people always act to maximize self-interest. The assumption that we are inherently selfish beings. Giftivism flips that idea on its head. What practices, systems and designs emerge when we believe people WANT to behave selflessly?

ServiceSpace evolved as an answer to that question. It started in Silicon Valley at the height of the dotcom boom. At a time of rampant accumulation. when a group of young friends began to build websites for non-profits free of charge. Money wasn’t the focus. The intention was to practice unconditional generosity. We delivered millions of dollars worth of service, but it was all offered as a gift. And everything we did had to follow our three guiding principles. [None of these principles by the way made ANY sense to the business world :)]

Our first principle was to stay 100% volunteer-run. We have no paid staff. People looked at that said we wouldn’t scale. Our second principle was don’t fundraise. We wanted to serve with whatever we had. People warned us that we wouldn’t sustain. And the third was to focus on small acts. No strategizing for grand outcomes. We were told we wouldn’t have impact. But here’s the thing -- these constraints pushed us to discover new forms of value. We sustained, scaled and blossomed into an entire ecosystem of service that now has 500,000 members across the world.

Along the way we chose to create services that are difficult to monetize. Like good news. Bad news is a lot easier to sell. That’s what drives the fear narrative and sensationalism of the headlines. But that’s not where the priceless lives! To counteract this we started a daily news service that shares inspiring real-life stories, then we started a site for uplifting videos. Another realm that’s hard to monetize and yet crucial is kindness. So we created a portal to spread kind acts. Later we started a pay-it-forward restaurant and a whole slew of other efforts… in all our adventures we learned repeatedly that generosity is always generative -- it generates new value. And giftivism organizes that value through 4 key shifts.

The shift from Consumption to Contribution:

People in cities see roughly 5000 ads a day (most of them subconsciously). The marketplace primes us for endless consumption. But the truth is we’re hard wired for contribution. That’s not wishful thinking. It’s actual neuroscience. When people give to good causes it can trigger the same pleasure response in the brain that doing something nice for themselves does! We don’t need neuroscience to tell us this – we know from experience – giving feels good! So we decided to unleash a series of experiments in micro-contribution. We began doing small acts of kindness. Like paying toll for the car behind you at a tollbooth, or buying coffee for a stranger at a cafe. A friend traveling first class spontaneously decided to trade his seat with an elderly woman in economy. Now imagine being on the receiving end of any of those acts. These small, counterculture gestures light up the giver and receiver. Everybody wins because generosity is NOT a zero sum game. Then we created Smile Cards. These little cards can be passed on with the kind act. They explain to the recipient that someone anonymously reached out simply to make their day, and now they can pay-it-forward by doing a kind act for someone else and passing the card along. The smile card becomes an invitation to create ripples of good everywhere. We’ve shipped over a million cards to people in over 90 countries and run a website that hosts tens of thousands of real life kindness stories. Imagine a world where people are continually reaching out to each other in this priceless way! Every moment becomes a gift. It’s a beautiful thing because it starts to rewire your mind when you into every situation and instead of asking “What can I take” – you’re constantly asking what can I give? What can I give? Soon you find that your actions begin to catalyze a rich network of ripples. And you tap into the joy of purpose.

The second shift is from Transaction to Trust

Karma Kitchen is a prime example of this. It’s a restaurant we started and what makes it unusual is there are no prices on the menu. At the end of the meal guests receive a check for $0.00 with a note explaining that their meal was a gift from someone who came before them. If they wish to keep the circle of giving going they can pay-forward for someone who comes after them. When we started we didn’t know if this crazy idea would work! But six years later Karma Kitchen is still going strong. Amazing things happen when you count on people to be generous. It sparks something deep inside. One time we had a computer scientist serving tables. At the end of the meal one guest who was skeptical about the whole pay-it-forward idea handed him a $100 bill, “You trust me to pay-it-forward,” he said, “Well, I trust you to bring me back the right change.”This wasn’t part of the plan. Our volunteer ran through a list of options in his head. Should he split the money 50:50? Should he try and calculate the price of the meal? Suddenly the answer came to him. He handed the $100 bill back to the guest, and then opened up his own wallet and added an extra $20. In that moment, both waiter and guest experienced a mini transformation and “got” what Karma Kitchen is about. It wasn’t about the money. But when we drop the habit of quid pro quo you enter the natural flow of giftivism. You don’t know who paid for you or who will receive your contribution. But you trust in the whole cycle. Things move beyond the control of the personal ego, and every contribution becomes a profound act of trust. And trust generates a web of resilience. Today Karma Kitchen has chapters in six cities around the world.

The third shift is from Isolation to Community

The mindset of me-me-me is isolating and has limited power. But what happens when you move from me-to-we? That’s our friend Pancho, one of the most fearless giftivists I know. He lives by choice in East Oakland-- a neighborhood full of gang violence and poverty where there are more liquor stores than grocery stores. But the doors of Pancho’s house are never locked. There’s a garden in the back where they grow fruit and vegetables. They run outdoor yoga classes and a weekly meditation gathering. Anyone can join. And every week Pancho and his friends collect all the unharvested fruit from the neighborhood and organize a fruit stand that offers local, organic produce to the community for free. They have created a context for people to share their gifts with each other. Now people clean the streets together, they water each other’s plants, and take care of each other’s children. They used to hide under their beds when they heard gunshots. Now they come out onto the street to see if anyone needs help. When you move from isolation to community you tap into the power of synergy. The sum is always greater than the parts.

The fourth shift is from Scarcity to Abundance

Scarcity is a mindset. Gandhi once said there’s enough in this world for every man’s need but not every man’s greed. When you move away from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of “we have enough” you unlock new forms of capital. Social capital, trust capital, synergistic capital...you discover breakthrough models of abundance. Like the one this man created. This is Dr. V -- my granduncle. In 1976 he, and his five brothers and sisters started an 11-bed eye hospital in India called Aravind. At Aravind no one who needs care is turned away. They do 60% of their surgeries for free. They don't do any fundraising or accept donations. And yet it is a fully self-sustaining enterprise. How does it work? Patients can choose if they want to pay or not. The revenue from paying patients goes towards covering costs for the others. The quality of care whether you pay or do not is worldclass. It's a brilliant, elegant and breathtakingly compassionate system that REALLY works. Today Aravind is the largest provider of eye care on the planet. Over 38 million patients seen. More than 5 million surgeries performed. It has redefined the impossible. Harvard Business School has been studying it for years trying to understand how a place that breaks all the rules of business still succeeds. The thing is Aravind doesn’t succeed in spite of the fact that it breaks these rules. It succeeds because of it.

Giftivism isn’t a utopian vision for the distant future. It’s part of our priceless inheritance in this very moment. The rewards are built-in. As we shift from consumption to contribution we discover into the joy of purpose. As we move from transaction to trust we build social resilience. As we move from isolation to community we tap into the power of synergy and as we replace the scarcity mindset with one of abundance, we identify radically new possibilities.

I began this talk with the story of one desperate teenager. I’d like to close with the story of another. Julio Diaz was coming home from work one night when he was stopped by a teenager with a knife. “Give me your wallet,” the boy said. Julio pulled out his wallet and handed it over. As the boy turned to run Julio said, “wait you forgot something.” The boy looked back. “You forgot to take my coat,” said Julio. “It’s cold. And if you’re going to be robbing people all night you’ll need this.” The boy is now utterly confused, but he takes the coat. Then Julio says, “It’s pretty late, why don’t you join me for dinner. There’s a restaurant I like around the corner.” Incredibly, the boy joins him. So there’s Julio dining at a restaurant with his robber. Treating him with nothing but compassion. At the end of the meal, Julio says to his new friend, ‘Look I’d love to buy you dinner but --you have my wallet.” Sheepishly the boy hands the wallet back to him. Then Julio leans forward and says quietly, “I need to ask you for one more thing…can I have your knife too?” Without a word, the boy slides his knife across the table.

What we will do for love will always be far more powerful than what we will do for money. What we can do together will always be far greater than what we can do alone. And when we cultivate the heart of giftivism within ourselves, our companies and our communities, we begin to unleash our true prosperity.

We begin to move from being a market economy to being part of a gift ecology.

It begins with small steps. I invite each one of you to think about what your small step will be. What is YOUR giftivist resolution?

May we each take that step. May we change ourselves, may we change the world.

“EcoMind Workshop/Seminar is designed to engage participants in Frances Moore Lappé's core idea of “changing the way we think to create the world we want.” To help us examine our core assumptions about community, democracy, hope, fear and courage in the context of today’s global challenges, as well as within ourselves and our communities, the workshop uses a range of media tools and participatory activities.

All of us at the Small Planet Institute are delighted by your interest in piloting our newest EcoMind project, and in sharing EcoMind’s powerful messages with those within your sphere of influence.

Enjoy! Please contact us with any comments or questions, or to share your experiences with the EcoMind Workshop.

Sincerely,”Frances Moore Lappé & the Small Planet Team

FRITJOF CAPRA: In your latest book, EcoMind, you pose the question, "Is there a way of perceiving the environmental challenge that is at once hardheaded, evidence based, and invigorating?" And then you write, "I believe it is possible that we can turn today's breakdown into a planetary breakthrough on one condition. We can do it if we can break free of a set of dominant but misleading ideas that are taking us down." When did it occur to you that we could have an invigorating approach to solving environmental problems?

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ: It was a totally unplanned book, and it has changed my life. It started when I walked out of a conference in Washington, D.C. in 2008. I had just heard the most knowledgeable environmental leaders and the most amazing speeches over several days, but I noticed that, as the hours went by, the crowds were shrinking in these brilliant lectures. I walked out, and I felt deflated, like the proverbial ton of bricks had just hit me.

As I went home to Boston, I said, "Wait a minute. This can't work." I was reacting to the framing of the messages. They seemed still locked in the mechanical, quantitative frame, and thus not really reflecting ecological truths, which for me means focusing on the quality of relationships. It occurred to me that a lot of today's dominant messages — some that are part of the environmental movement and others that seem to just float through our culture — are creating obstacles and standing in the way. So I asked whether we could break through to more of an ecological way of seeing and feeling.

FC: Do you remember the first example that came to your mind?

FML: One message has to do with the fundamental notion, which you hear everywhere, that "We've hit the limits of the finite Earth." Gradually I realized that this is a mechanical metaphor — it's quantitative, not ecological.

This message confirms the dominant belief system characterized by the premise that there's not enough of anything: not enough goods, not enough goodness — meaning that there are not enough material things, nor enough good qualities of human character.

I love to quote the dear, now deceased, Hermann Scheer, the great German environmental leader, who reminded people that the sun provides us 15,000 times the daily dose of energy compared to what we're currently using in fossil fuel. Hit the limits of the Earth? No. Of human violation of nature’s rules? Yes!

FC: That really relates to your early work about food. You said then that it's not the quantity of food that's not enough, but it's the distribution and unbalance of power and so on.

FML: The premise of scarcity creates a culture driven by fear. That puts us in a perpetual state of feeling we're in competition over crumbs — creating a spiral that intensifies, as everyone feels that they have to get theirs before it all runs out. The message of "hitting the limits" is especially scary for people who are just at the edge of survival themselves, which is the case for most people on Earth.

I'm very sensitive to messages that make people feel more fearful. That's one reason why I love the Center for Ecoliteracy and the work you do. You know that beauty opens people up and reduces fear and that people learn to trust themselves through working with the Earth itself and exploratory learning.

I also don't like saying that growth is the problem, because for most people, growth is really positive. You love it when your grandchildren grow, your love grows, your flowers grow. We should not bless what we're doing now with the term "growth." We should call it what it is, an economy of waste and destruction.

So the reframe I'm asking all to consider, which you're living at the Center for Ecoliteracy, is a shift from assuming that the problem is that we've hit the limits to recognizing this: the global crisis is that our human-made systems are perversely misaligned, both with human nature and the wider nature. The challenge is not, "How do we pull back?" but, "How do we remake our human-made systems to align positively with what we know creates sustainable and resilient communities?"

FC: In the book, you say that there are three S's: scarcity, separateness, and stasis. Can you talk about them?

FML: My fundamental realization when I wrote Diet for a Small Planet at age twenty-six — though I didn't have the language then — was that we create the world according to the mental maps we hold. We hear the cliché "Seeing is believing," but we should realize that "Believing is seeing." I'll quote Albert Einstein: "It is theory which decides what we can observe."

So today we see through a lens of scarcity. We see lack everywhere, including with food. We see it with love. We see it with energy. We see it with, you name it, parking places —all things, but also we see a scarcity of the qualities we need, including basic goodness.

Stasis is the idea that things are relatively fixed, and even human nature is fixed: "We are what we are. We don't have the capacity to change."

And finally there is the premise that we are all separate, from one another and from all earthly creatures.

Those are the three “S’s” of the scarcity mind that blocks us from solutions right in front of our noses.

FC: How does the EcoMind overcome these pitfalls?

FML: EcoMind focuses on the three C's, the opposite of the S's. Instead of separateness, there's connectedness. Instead of stasis, reality is continuous change, and instead of scarcity is co-creation. If the nature of life is that we're all connected and that change is continuous, then we are all co-creators.

As I was saying in the car driving over, it dawned on me that from this perspective, "If we're all connected, then we're all implicated." So we can stop pointing fingers. And the good news is, with this worldview, we see that we all have power, and that's changed my whole concept of how I can change myself.

It reminds me of the motto of the organization my daughter and I founded, the Small Planet Institute. These are the words you'll see on our website, capturing what we learned traveling the world together and meeting people facing the greatest obstacles: "Hope is not what we find in evidence; it's what we become in action." Really, it should say, "Hope is what we become in action together in community."

FC: That brings to mind something you said in a lecture, maybe 30 years or so ago, which I still remember: "If I have relationships to many people rather than competitively to only a few, that enriches me, and because I am enriched, it also enriches all my relationships."

Over the last five years or so, I've thought a lot about networks, because I wrote a textbook about the systems view of life, which is all about networks. And then I came to think about what is power in the social network.

I arrived at the idea that there are two kinds of power. There's power as domination over others, and for that, the ideal structure is the hierarchy, as we know from the military, the Catholic Church, and other hierarchies. But power in a network empowers others through connecting them.

At the same time, while we are writing our books and having these inspiring conversations, there are massive forces like Monsanto and the oil companies and the pharmaceutical industry and all these corporate powers who own the media and the politicians and get their tax breaks and their subsidies and everything, and totally distort the playing field.

How do we deal with them? How do we turn this reality into an invigorating approach? When I get depressed, that's what I get depressed about.

FML: Me, too. I think it starts with the ecological worldview in which we grasp that we humans, too, are products of the contexts that we create together.

History and lab experiments and personal experience show us that human beings do not do well under three conditions: when power is concentrated, when there is no transparency, and when blaming is the cultural norm.

So, one of the most important messages of EcoMind to me is to think of ourselves as a social ecology in which we can identify the characteristics that bring out the worse or the best in us. For the best, I would start with three conditions: the continual dispersion of power, transparency in human relationships, and society's cultivating mutual accountability instead of blame, blame, blame.

I think that “growing up as a species” means that we must step up and say, "True democracy is possible. Democracy is not just elections and a market economy, because we can have both and still have power that's so concentrated that it will bring out the very worst in human beings, including greed and callousness."

Right now we are experiencing the scarcity of a vision of democracy that works. That's one scarcity that I believe truly exists. And yet we know there are societies that do much better than ours. I was just in Germany, where they don't allow political advertising. Can you imagine? Their campaign seasons are just a fraction of ours in length, and most of the election costs are covered publicly or with small donations rather than corporate funded. So Germany is able to pass laws encouraging citizens to invest in green energy and to become the world's leader in solar energy by 2020, even though Germany is a small, cloudy country.

FC: You talk about "living democracy." What do you mean by that?

FML: I mean both meanings of "living": that it's a daily practice, and that it's a living organism, ever evolving. I love to quote the first African American federal judge, who said, "Democracy is not being. It is becoming. It is easily lost, but never finally won. Its essence is eternal struggle." I used to always drop that last line, thinking it would scare people, but now I'm thinking, "Okay, we know it's a struggle. So let's make it a good struggle."

A living democracy to me starts with what we teach our children at the earliest age about their relationships to nature and understanding what makes our social ecology work: How do we accept differences in our peers? How do we learn to create inclusive groups instead of bullying and "othering"? We know now that human beings are soft-wired to see others unlike themselves as threatening. But we also now know the kind of teaching and coaching that takes us beyond that reaction.

Many of the best schools today are enabling children to be real decision makers and doers. Once you have children with that experience of knowing they have a voice, you cannot put that genie back in the bottle. Are they then going to just turn over their fates to the president or the political party? No, of course not. They're going to ask, why can’t we solve our problems? What can I do? They are going to be engaged.

"Ma'ikwe Schaub Ludwig is the Executive Director of Dancing Rabbit
Ecovillage, the pioneering sustainability educator who heads up
Ecovillage Education US, and a member of the Board of Directors of the
Fellowship for Intentional Community. She believes strongly that
sustainability is possible, assuming we can learn to cooperate, share
and assess what really makes us happy, rather than staying bought in to
the material excess culture we've been raised in. In addition to more
common sustainability work, she teaches cooperative group dynamics as a
key skill set in moving us toward sustainability and spiritual activism
as a framework for linking the personal and political. Ma'ikwe is a
regular writer for Communities magazine and is the author of Passion as
Big as a Planet: Evolving Eco-Activism in America."